The one thing you do need to know about the story of Sanaya Sahib.

Is it possible that a tiny child could be snatched from her mother’s side in a suburban park in broad daylight? That a barefoot drunk grabbed her and ran, ended her life and left her body in a shallow creek?

Is it possible that a family, unconnected to that child, might stumble across the little girl’s body in the middle of a pitch-black night?

The story of the fate of Sanaya Sahib, the 15-month old girl whose body was discovered in Melbourne parkland in the early hours of Sunday morning, is so terrifyingly, heart-stoppingly random that nobody wants to believe it.

But opinions are everywhere. According to Melbourne talk-back host Tony Jones, there isn’t enough community outrage about Sanaya’s fate.

“As it stands now, we’ve got a kidnapping murdering madman on the run and it’s something we should be screaming from the rooftops about,” he said on-air today.

“There should be some form of hysteria in the town, but I’m not sensing any of that.”

That’s because people are busy doing what frightened people do, putting barriers between themselves and an horrific event, so they can go on thinking that it’s a thing that could ever happen to them.

In the case as horrendous as a child murder, nobody wants to imagine that there is nothing a loving parent could do to protect their child against someone who wishes them harm.

None of us want to think we live with the reality where in one moment, they could lose everything. We demand more rhyme and reason to the world than that.

We demand a back story and a reason. We need steps of separation between ourselves and the horror, and we will find them.

It is likely that we will find out what happened to little Sanaya. Too many men and women are working relentlessly towards that result. It’s likely that charges will be laid. And a killer will be stopped.

But while detectives do their jobs, there is only one thing we really need to know about Sanaya Sahib.

She should still be here.

She was a tiny, tiny child, just over a year old. A baby at an age where she would be toddling, babbling, in a constant state of discovery about her world and the people in it.

Images streaming out of screens show a little girl with an easy smile, eyes bigger than pennies, and crisp white clothes that someone had bought for her, washed for her, dressed her in for her photos.

She was a tiny, tiny child whose life has been taken from her by an adult.

Child murders are blessedly rare in Australia, but any number is too high.

Between 2008-2010, 49 children were murdered in our country*. Forty-nine lives stunted and stolen by damaged adults, some of whom were strangers, many of whom were closer.

There’s nothing salacious or juicy about stories like Sanaya Sahib’s. There’s nothing about it worth gossiping about at the water cooler, or ranting about on talk-back.

All that is true about this story as it stands right now is the fact of its overwhelming sadness.

Sanaya deserved far, far better. And so does her memory.

• Source: Homicide in Australia, 2008-1010.